PJM consulted with the Members Committee on two proposals to revise its tariff to extend the collar on capacity prices for two more years and implement an expedited interconnection track for large projects to bring new capacity online quickly.
The price collar extension would apply to the 2028/29 and 2029/30 Base Residual Auctions (BRAs), a change PJM’s Board of Managers asked stakeholders to comment on at the conclusion of the Critical Issue Fast Path (CIFP) process in 2025. Board chair and interim CEO David Mills noted the extension also was requested in a letter from the National Energy Dominance Council and governors of all 13 PJM member states, though he said the letter was not determinative in the board’s decision to proceed with the changes. (See PJM Board of Managers Selects CIFP Proposal to Address Large Load Growth.)
Stakeholders were divided on the announcement. Generation owners pointed to PJM’s statements that the price collar was a one-time measure to allow supply to catch up to ballooning demand. State officials said it supports the discussions around implementing a reliability backstop auction to procure resources outside the capacity market.
Mills said the market conditions that originally led PJM to implement the collar still are present.
The expedited interconnection track (EIT) proposal would allow 10 projects with at least 250 MW of unforced capacity to undergo a 10-month study process. It would require readiness deposits of $15,000/MW and $500,000 study deposits from the developer and notice from the state’s primary siting authority indicating support for the project timeline. The EIT was one of several changes the Board of Managers approved through the CIFP process.
The 250-MW threshold has been a core point of contention between stakeholders, with some arguing it should be lower to allow a wider range of projects to qualify, especially if large resources take longer to complete. PJM lowered the threshold from 500 MW during the CIFP process based on those comments. (See “PJM Proposal,” PJM Stakeholders to Vote on Large Load CIFP Proposals.)
PJM’s Jason Shoemaker said if the same network upgrades are identified for projects in the general interconnection queue and EIT, the costs would be assigned to the EIT on the grounds there are stricter timelines for that resource coming online. Shoemaker said the intention is to avoid having costs split between two processes and neither proceeding with their end.
Once an application is submitted, no changes would be permitted to site control or characteristics such as fuel type or output.
Shoemaker said if there were fewer than 10 projects submitted in a delivery year, PJM would not revise the eligibility requirements, adding that the EIT is designed to have a large impact on system reliability while minimizing disruption to the interconnection queue. In response to stakeholders saying the entry requirements could prove so onerous that there will be no applications, Shoemaker said if a project is going to be allowed to jump the rest of the queue, the requirements to do so should be steep.
Mills said stakeholders should not assume a one-size-fits-all approach will be taken for how states will signal their support for the timeline on project siting and permitting. He said there will be a full range of responses across the 13 states within the RTO, with some states supportive of projects while others may seek to limit or prohibit data centers.
